Left Field Cinema

Fingers was writer and director James Toback’s first film as a director, Toback is a respected film artist who has a body of solid, rather than outstanding, work. Fingers is his finest film. Harvey Keitel stars as a man who is torn between his Mob-connected father and his concert pianist mother. Fingers is the style of film where the 1970s American film industry excelled, there is a series of unsung beautifully made films from America during this period: Scarecrow, Cutters Way and Night Moves immediately spring to mind. However, the finest of these forgotten 1970s masterpieces is Fingers. Harvey Keitel is mesmerising as one of the most unlikeable central characters of even the wildly anti-heroic 1970s. He is arrogant, self-obsessed and violent sexually, yet Keitel infuses him with a tender side. The film is a character study of such depth that the only comparable film that springs to mind is Bob Rafelson’s undeniable masterpiece Five Easy Pieces.

Remakes have been standard practice within the film industry since the very beginning, however recently they have become to be seen as lazy and often pointless. This is often to do with the percentage of poorly made remakes compared to the passable works, poor remakes out weighing the good ones with alarming frequency. It was with this in mind that a film with such prodigious cult following as Fingers was remade in 2005 as The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Not only was a brilliantly anti-heroic 1970s American masterpiece being remade, but also it was being remade in France.

The beginning of The Beat That My Heart Skipped, after the credits, starts with frenetic camera movement. Two men are in a car, the camera jerks and slides between the two men capturing their hurried conversation. The men arrive at house with rats in a bag, ready to plant them in the rundown house in order to drive out the tenants; with this job completed the three go to the pub, the soundtrack kicks off and a fight begins. It is a wonderfully kinetic beginning to the action and draws you straight into the film. This is the French Mean Streets! Not an unfair comparison beyond the resemblance between a young De Niro and lead actor Romain Duris. The Beat That My Heart Skipped has the same basic outlined story as Fingers however it contains a greater degree of subtly and a uniquely Gallic flavour. This is the best of American film being reinterpreted and reimagined in the arthouse of France. A character study with a great emotional depth. What really grounds the film is the relationship at the heart of it, between father and son. Thomas (Duris) is asked by his father at the beginning to collect some money that is owed to him. On the drive away, that night, he meets a friend of his late mother who asks if Tom has continued to play the piano – his mother’s obsession, this exacerbates the tug of war between the two sides of Tom’s personality. Between being like his mother or father, between becoming another slumlord gangster and perhaps achieving some kind of redemption. Tom’s world here and before is electrified by music, the character is always wearing headphones. The soundtrack is a wonderful combination of classical and pop music, one of the greatest strengths of the film is the obvious care that went into the sound design.

Tom, in an effort to learn to become a concert pianist, begins lessons with a young, beautiful Vietnamese piano teacher who speaks no French. The film has subtly set up a position where Tom has both a good angel and a bad angel; the rest of the movie is focused on which way he will fall. Duris is equally as dynamic as the potential pianist and the corrupt real estate fixer, this is a performance of energy and power that cinema craves but so rarely gets. The rest of the cast excel in their roles, in particular Niels Arestrup as Tom’s errant father and Linh Dan Pham as the piano teacher, they added the necessary shade to what is essentially a one man character study. They are the relationships which Tom is seen most commonly through. Both sides of Tom’s schizophrenic personality are shown with equal care and beauty, the lines forever blurring. The concert pianist who speaks to a teacher like a thug and screams when he fails to play the exact notes, and an angry young who can play beautiful music and is often quite romantic and tender in his gestures to females. The thing that sets this film apart from both Fingers and Mean Streets is how damn likeable Tom is, Duris burns up the screen with charisma so rarely seen. He is lightning in a bottle. The emotional impact of the scenes with his father have real impact because of the performances, you really feel Tom’s dilemma. With his mother dead his duty is to help his father, or is his duty still with his dead mother? Tom’s likeability is often completely at odds with his actions in the film – he is violent, he extorts money, he is an adulterer, he is a slumlord who plants rats in poor people’s buildings. Duris brings a palatable rage to Tom that can be felt by anyone near to him. But despite all this you really hope Tom can manage to become who he wants to be. The director often helps this by having a number of quiet scenes within the movie allowing the picture to breathe, often focusing solely on Tom’s face or body, focusing on him in his private world with his headphones on, connected to his mother. Some of the movie’s best scenes have Tom in his own world practicing piano fingering in packed bars with the soundtrack blocking out the bar's sounds. The finest scene of the movie creates such a beautiful dichotomy of sounds and actions that it could be perhaps the visual and aural look into Tom’s soul. Tom and a few of his real estate work colleagues are violently beating squatters in one of their buildings, during the scene one of the men puts on a radio and The Locomotion plays, the camera begins to move at a sickeningly high speed, then slows to focus on Tom’s face; the directors then ends the scene so abruptly that the audience feels disorientated by the shift in tone.

Jacques Audiard’s direction is judged to perfection both through its use of stillness and frenetic camera movement. He is always following Tom, showing the audience Tom’s complete life. He circles and glides around Tom catching the smallest of eye movements, the tiniest glare, the subtlest smile. This is character direction. He understands his film lives or dies with Duris and he does not cover this fact but allows the camera to revel in Duris, creating a voyeuristic feeling within the audience. The audience can see that it is watching real life. Very rarely has any director captured such a feeling of immediacy, like you are forever watching someone live their life, not that you as an audience member is the character but rather you are watching a wholly rounded individual living his life. Audiard also made the brave decision of filling the film with music, barely is there a scene which does not have some kind of music, from Tom’s efforts on the piano to the brilliant soundtrack. This allows the film to create an inner world for Tom, and brings out his interior feelings without using the camera. The direction keeps us at a distance, the music makes us intimate. Which is a wonderfully unusual choice by a director.

The scenes between Tom and his father are directed with wonderful restraint by Audiard so as not to overwhelm the audience with a voyeur’s intimacy but rather to capture a father and son’s difficult relationship. He does not vilify Tom’s father, which would have been so easy to do, but rather he fills not only the relationship between Tom and his father but also the character of the father himself with a warmth and dignity and respect that it is impossible to do anything but fully understand the predicament. This is one of the few films to truly understand, realise and show a realistic father son relationship.

Not only is this film unique due to its status of taking an American film and remaking it in French with a Gallic sensibility, it is also unusual in that it supersedes the original work in every way, and considering how well thought of Fingers is, this is quite a feat. Not only that but it is also arguably the best film made in 2005. Anyone who watches this masterpiece of modern French cinema will find it impossible not to completely sympathise with Tom, and hope and pray and wish for his redemption.

W.McLachlan